“I am flabbergasted and upset that each and every one of the women being talked about as front-runners are the specific women who have already alienated me. I am as frustrated by this terrible coincidence as you are, believe me!”

Got the first three measures of “Heyr, Himna smidhur” written down — this is the bare-bones first take at the theme. You can learn more here if you like.

I’m sick of saying I want to get this down on paper and done, and then between going down to see my mom on one day, and then wanting to just cocoon and fucking relax on the other, I get nothing whatsoever done AT ALL, from writing music to shopping for food. I’m just so fucking sick of that. I miss having a real weekend.

For several years now, I’ve believed that both Jews and women have a uniquely bizarre position in the political world. We’re both in the weird position of being subject to abuse from both sides, to the point where the old definitions of right and left break down completely. Right-wing woman- and Jew-hatred are well-documented, but there are so many instances where left-wing woman- and Jew-hatred (I’m not going to use the more sanitized nouns anymore) are just as poisonous, and leave both populations feeling politically homeless, as if we’re a footnote on both sides and can expect absolutely no political support from either end of things. The right side simply kills us and hates us openly, while the left taunts and teases as if our survival is a diverting intellectual bagatelle to bandy around, and we die anyway.

Worse than that though, another frightening way in which women and Jews are alike is the way that certain segments are incredibly eager to embrace the side that would destroy them through outright violence as opposed to hidden violence and political neglect. Thus we see all those white Evangelical women who vote Republican because they’ve made the conscious choice to throw their lot in with white men, making all other women their enemy, and now these particular Orthodox Jews reveal themselves to be just as happy to unite against “the other” — and share the same outright woman-hating attitudes as the right-wing mass shooters — as any Jew-hating white nationalist.

Just as those right-wing women are happy to sit in the shit of woman-hatred up to their necks as long as they get to watch a troublemaking woman sitting in it up to her bottom lip, these quislings are doing the same to liberal Jews: cozying up to the right wing and letting the liberal Jews’ synagogues get shot up. “Ours” are safe.*

Take them, not me.

Is it all Orthodox Jews? Of course not, no more than it is all white women with husbands and sons.

But is there clearly something going on in both cases that needs to get called out?

You bet your ass.

Am I confident that any Jewish thinkers who aren’t woman rabbis will be able to smoke this one out? Not on your life.

* Don’t for one second think that shared woman-hatred isn’t a huge part of what draws them together. Woman-hatred draws all of these right-wing crazies together, in every single religion or no religion at all. I still remember when gobsmacked black journalists were sharing around that dialogue between black Republican Michael Steele and some nameless white GOP honcho, and wondering aloud why on Earth Steele could be so stupid as to think he had a place at the GOP table as a black man when the reason why he even wanted to be at that table was right there in the interview. I mean, did no one hear it when the white GOP-ed looked him in the face less than one minute in and said, first thing, “And you’re a good pro-life man!” Did not one else hear that? Black though he was, Steele was just one more swinging dick who fears women’s body autonomy; no matter the color, creed, or ethnicity, all men can and do unite on that one front — you may be a n*gger, and you may be a honky, and you may be a heeb, and you may be a raghead, but at least we all agree that those bitches better know their place! Ah, the things that become clear as day when you see them through the lens of unapologetic feminism …

And do you know why it doesn’t work? Because we aren’t the goddamned problem.

This is also a huge part of why young women really, really need to STFU and listen to the old ones. All this “lean in” bullshit and “let’s just pretend we’re equal and men will respect us?”

We’ve already learned it doesn’t work. We learned this shit in the 80s. All the power suits and little red bowties in the world don’t do shit, because we aren’t the problem. The generation before mine probably learned it, and so did the one before that.

Men are the problem, along with women who realize this and resign themselves to it by knifing the female competition in the back.

Money quote: “In recent years, a number of similar studies looked at what actually happens when women take the popular advice—as suggested by Lean In and dozens of articles—and consistently negotiate for better compensation: They are penalized across the board.”

I would write this on a baseball bat with a woodburning tool and bang the next person who tells me to Lean In on the face with it.

Another: “In recent days, talking to friends who work in science, film, advertising, and other fields, I’ve realized that my feelings aren’t unique. “I’m always telling myself I should go to this career panel and networking thing, but I can’t take the empowerment anymore,” said a friend of mine who works in the sciences. “Why don’t dudes need to do all that empowerment bullshit?” Instead of speaking at endless women’s empowerment conferences, perhaps male executives should be forced to attend their own conferences, where they are trained to recognize ingrained bias and also to keep their hands to themselves, just for instance.”